A liquid crystal display device is constructed while a liquid crystal display element is sandwiched between a pair of glass substrates. By utilizing the features such as thinness, light weight, and low power consumption, the liquid crystal display device is widely used in a car navigation, an electronic book, a photo frame, industrial equipment, a television, a personal computer, a smartphone, and a tablet terminal, which are indispensable for everyday life and business. In these applications, liquid crystal display devices of various modes relating to the electrode arrangement and design of a substrate are studied in order to change optical characteristics of a liquid crystal layer.
For example, a vertical alignment (VA) mode, such as a multi-domain vertical alignment (MVA) mode, in which liquid crystal molecules having negative anisotropy of dielectric constant are vertically aligned with respect to a substrate surface, an in-plane switching (IPS) mode in which the liquid crystal molecules having positive or negative anisotropy of dielectric constant are horizontally aligned with respect to the substrate surface to apply a lateral electric field to the liquid crystal layer, and a fringe field switching (FFS) mode can be cited as a recent display system of the liquid crystal display device.
Among these, the FFS mode is widely used in smartphones and tablet terminals in recent years. As an FFS mode liquid crystal display device, for example, disclosed is the FFS mode liquid crystal display device including: a first and second transparent insulating substrates that are disposed opposite to each other with a predetermined distance with a liquid crystal layer containing multiple liquid crystal molecules interposed therebetween; multiple gate bus lines and data bus lines formed on the first transparent substrate and arranged in a matrix so as to restrict a unit pixel; a thin-film transistor provided at an intersection of the gate bus line and the data bus line; a counter electrode disposed in each unit pixel and made of a transparent conductor; and a pixel electrode disposed in each unit pixel being insulated from the counter electrode so as to form a fringe field together with the counter electrode, the pixel electrode being made of a transparent conductor and including multiple upper slits and lower slits arranged at a predetermined inclination such that a symmetrical shape is formed with a long side of the pixel as a center (for example, see Patent Literature 1).